Your Car is on Fire; Your Credit is Fine
This isn’t a story about a car. Or maybe it is, but not just mine; The Monday Blueprint early evening edition because the Marines have been deployed and Newegg is the new Radio Shack experience.
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How to Total a Car, Keep Your Credit, and Beat the System (Kind Of)
Man, it feels like I just purchased a car two years ago, because well I did, but because the insurance company said my kid totaled my Mitsubishi with what for all intents and purposes looked like a simple fender bender at maybe a three-mile-an-hour run-in with a utility pole, since last week Tuesday we’ve been driving around this eggplant.
Then Friday night, we ran the purple monster to Portsmouth. The engine light lit up, and once in town, the vehicle began sputtering around the twenty-mile-an-hour mark. So Sunday, I dropped the vehicle back off at the Manchester CarMax for repairs. Before entering the sales floor, I hung back for a minute in the parking lot, windows rolled up. The sun beat through the windows, and it was starting to get warm. But I had a few slugs of coffee to finish.
In a few days, my credit score is probably going to tank. The purple car was a bit glitchy, but the Mitsubishi was dead, and I still owed $11,000 on it.
The insurance company offered me a little over four.
Look, we all know it, insurance companies are built to minimize payouts. They thrive on actuarial sleight of hand and banking on our exhaustion. When they offered me that $4,000, that wasn’t lowball—it was a calculated bet that I wouldn’t push back.
But the extra three grand I negotiated by showing them 12 comparable market value vehicles, all of that cash went straight to the bank. So no check in my hand, no car in my driveway, and just a phantom of a loan. Yet, three days later, I drove off the CarMax lot in that purple car.
My first step was to stall the insurance claim as long as I could. This kept the rental going. Every day I didn’t sign with the insurance payout was another day with a car. Meanwhile, I made every Mitsubishi payment on time. No lates. No flags. As far as the bank and the credit bureaus were concerned, I was golden.
And because none of their departments talk to each other, because every time I spoke to CarMax, I spoke to a different person—sometimes even people who said they were in the Manchester location, but were sitting at a call center in Idaho—everyone continuing to fill out the same online forms (the same forms I was filling out at home)…
As far as CarMax was concerned? I was just another guy walking in with a down payment and a clean record.
The automated system created to make car purchasing streamlined and quick, the very system set up to benefit CarMax allowed me to slip in sideways between insurance payout and the repo man, between the glitch and the glitch report, and before anyone could say “wait a second,” I was back on the road.
Yes, I’m still making payments on a car that no longer exists. But I’m also still driving around.
The system is so fragmented, so automated, so proudly frictionless, you beat it by playing along harder than it was designed to handle. I wasn’t just a guy buying a car. I was Schrödinger’s borrower: both totaled and creditworthy at once.
Back in the parking lot, finishing off my coffee, thinking about how all this algorithmic magic lined up, I happened to glance in my rear-view mirror and saw this sun-faded tank-topped dude drinking a beer and wandering the lot.
He wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t loud. He wasn’t lost. He was just there because he stopped pretending the destination mattered.
Last week, I wrote in The Last Job My Father Understood, how in a small Ohio lumber town, where I was raised on the gospel of sweat-as-worth, I was shown how easily a machine could replace sixty men—how in that moment I realized the old rules of labor were collapsing, and no one wanted to admit it.
Automation in The Last Job is omnipresent. As is automation omnipresent in my hurry up and buy a purple car odyssey. Also, in both stories, automation is impersonal, replaces judgment, context, and relationship, and is only able to track status, timestamps, and stacked outputs. Last week, people were terrified of the computer because it made them obsolete. This week, the dealership didn’t notice my sleight of hand because they’re already halfway replaced by bots.
The original essay about Hoge Lumber Company was partly spawned by Kyla Scanlon’s essay The Four Phases of Institutional Collapse in the Age of AI.
Scanlon argues that our institutions—from democratic systems to expert gatekeepers—are unraveling amid rapid technological acceleration. She outlines a four-step progressive erosion: (1) first, denial of foundational change; (2) then frantic adaptation to emerging forces like AI and digital platforms; (3) next, systemic breakdown as institutional memory fractures and old guard structures fail; and (4) finally, a volatile scramble for what replaces the institutions. Across each phase, pillars like democracy, expertise, and continuity buckle under pressures like algorithmic governance, market-driven messaging, and attention scarcity.
My CarMax experience is a case study in Scanlon’s Phase One: Trust Erosion. The institutions are still technically functioning—my loan got processed, my claim got paid (mostly)—but nobody believes the institutions are working for us anymore. In fact, I’d argue that the auto insurance I paid for two years was more for the bank than me.
Behind almost every policy we sign, every warranty we never read, the systems aren’t built to protect you—they’re built to preserve liquidity, enforce compliance, and mitigate institutional risk. You’re just a node in the network. A payment stream. A maybe.
That’s why CarMax didn’t care about the totaled car. Why the bank didn’t flag the ghost note. Why the rental company kept giving me keys as long as someone was footing the bill. No human ever said, “Wait—does this make sense?” The only metric that mattered was whether the payment processed.
Okay then on Friday I wrote Why Your Gut’s Not Wrong: The Housing Market Should Feel Weird Right Now, where I mapped the distortion of perception in a housing market warped by delay tactics, broken incentives, and brokered realities. I said the inventory was fake, that the timelines were gamified, and that housing feels rigged because the system is rigged, calibrated upon an algorithm.
These systems—whether in blue-collar labor, in housing, or at a car dealership don’t collapse all at once, but they do fray. The dehumanize and then calcify into something colder. The dealership didn’t stop me because it couldn’t, and the real estate market doesn’t fix itself because it won’t. You survive not by believing the rules, but by understanding which rules don’t really exist anymore.
Then, of course, over the weekend, this happened:
Massive anti-ICE protests erupted across downtown L.A. Over 2,000 demonstrators blocked the 101 Freeway. Five Waymo robotaxis were vandalized—windows smashed, spray-painted, and burned. President Trump deployed roughly 2000 National Guard troops and later some Marines.
And I keep thinking about Scanlon’s “little delivery robots” that “know exactly where they’re going.”
That’s Phase Two: Frantic Adaptation. The bots are running the shop, the humans are acting like bots to keep up, and the only rule is: don’t fall behind. The irony? The only way I pulled off the purple car sleight of hand was by out-humaning the system—talking to twelve people, stalling payouts, playing the shell game just long enough for the automation to think I was legit.
Scanlon’s Phase Three—Systemic Breakdown—doesn’t look like flames or riots. It looks like silence. Like shrugging. Like a purple car with a check engine light and a finance contract that nobody reads anymore.
And more dangerously, no human being is responsible anymore. Not in a way you can touch.
“For better or worse,” Scanlon writes, “Trump is the first human-algorithm hybrid president—governing via Truth Social truths, bond market reactions, and direct market signals. A feedback loop in a suit. What breaks here is a version of democracy. Algorithms bypass institutions, but institutions were our only mechanism for managing complexity at scale.”
Institutions—the DMV, the zoning board, the insurance adjuster, the court clerk, visa offices, consulates, asylum boards, labor unions, local courts, social service nonprofits, even churches—used to slow things down. Used to mediate. Used to be the buffer between power and panic. Used to give us time to think and to pause to decide if what we were doing made sense.
Now the loop is instant. ICE raids. Riots. Waymo fires. A military deployment faster than any hearing, any vote, any town hall.
And we’ve always argued about immigration, but this is the first time we’ve rolled out the National Guard since and the Marines without governorial request since 1932 when Hoover directly ordered the U.S. Army troops (infantry, cavalry, tanks) into Washington, D.C., to forcibly clear World War I veterans occupying federal grounds. Except, Hoover didn’t need a governor because Washington D.C. doesn’t have a governor. So just the federal order and tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue.
L.A., San Francisco, this isn’t just unrest. This is public grief becoming public fire. Rage not only at ICE but at what ICE represents: a system that governs without touch. A system that can tell you to go, but can’t tell you why.
This is the human algorithm breaking loose; the Luddites smashing automated looms and knitting frames; the always-breaking-down computerized saw at Hoge Lumber Company, me working the insurance and banking complex to delay my way into another car.
But the real danger here isn't the riot. It's the shrug. It’s the ignoring of the flashing engine light. It’s the sun-faded tank-topped man wandering the parking lot with a half-finished beer, with no more places of value to go. It’s the institutions so hollow, they don’t break when burned.
LAST WEEK IN THE STOCK MARKET:
TACOs might be off the menu in D.C., but Wall Street’s still choking on the salsa with a mouthful of hot sauce and regret.
The market closed Friday on a sugar high. The S&P crossed the psychological 6000 mark, which kinda feels like hitting 10,000 steps on your Fitbit—doesn’t change your health instantly, but at least feels like you accomplished something. Also, the 10-year yield fell slightly, suggesting less pressure from interest rates.
Nasdaq: 19,529.95 (▲ +1.13%)
S&P: 6,000.36 (▲ +2.02%)
Dow: 42,762.87 (▲ +0.51%)
10-Year: 4.510% (▼ –6.3 bps)
VIX: 18.48 (▼ –6.87%)
Gold: $3,332.68 (▲ +0.30%)
Top gainers flew into a strange updraft of niche hype, aerial ambition, and vintage retail nostalgia: Newegg Commerce (▲ +42.82%) came back from the dead with a resurrection arc straight out of a Reddit fever dream—either a meme reawakening or a sudden GPU restock from 2021. Meanwhile, the skies belonged to Joby Aviation (▲ +13.96%) and Archer Aviation (▲ +12.59%), both cashing in on electric aircraft euphoria like Blade Runner on a budget. AST SpaceMobile (▲ +14.88%) dialed up the orbiting internet fantasy, while Goodyear Tire (▲ +12.03%) got dragged along for the ride—because even flying cars need to land somewhere.
Big-time losers bled across biotech, apparel, and semiconductors, with Summit Therapeutics (▼ –30.50%) face-planting after what was likely a clinical setback, Gap Inc. (▼ –20.18%) unraveling faster than its denim inventory, and Regeneron (▼ –19.01%) taking a brutal tumble—possibly from earnings, litigation, or just a rough news cycle. Rounding out the list were Ambarella (▼ –15.10%) and Cooper Companies (▼ –14.61%), casualties of tech contraction and medical device drag.
Bottom line: The market is in media res, chasing storytelling over substance. Aviation stocks aren’t flying because of revenue; they’re flying because the idea of flying cars is George Jetson cinematic. Newegg didn’t spike on fundamentals because it still carries the ghost of meme-stock theater—less “What does this company do?” and more “What story can I tell if I buy this stock today?” Attention is currency. Speculation theater, and confidence co-authored by Reddit Threads, CNBC soundbites, and whatever’s pulsing on X or Blueskies or Threads or Substack or whatever the cool kids are doing these days (Substack, definitely Substack).
What does Newegg even do, by the way? Also, in other news, seriously thinking about building out my own desktop machine like I did back in the early 1990s just because I can. Remember those Radioshack days? Newegg does too.
Big Themes to Watch
1. Tariff Theater: Act II, Now With Supply Chains
The trade war reboot is logistics sabotage with a side of geopolitical spite. China’s choking rare earths. The U.S. is clamping down on ethane. And West Coast ports just watched container imports from China drop 28.5%—the worst hit since the pandemic. The Geneva truce barely cooled, and already gloves off.
➡️ Watch for: Energy and materials stocks swinging on policy breath. Multinational supply chains quietly panic-pivoting to Mexico. And commodities like wheat acting weird as Canada bets on tariffs like it’s Farmville.
2. Inflation Week Is a Loaded Dice Roll
PPI drops Thursday. CPI follows Friday. And everyone’s hoping inflation doesn’t sneak back in through the tariff doggy door. Last week’s labor data was “not terrible” enough to delay a Fed move, but the fuse is lit. If prices start creeping again, December rate cut dreams could evaporate faster than your grocery budget.
➡️ Watch for: Treasuries flinching at every pre-market whisper. Real estate sentiment cooling again. And Powell’s December calendar slowly catching fire.
3. Apple’s WWDC Was a Polite Shrug
“Liquid Glass” got the rebrand. AI got a whisper. And Apple stock dropped anyway. The company promised the future and delivered... a design update. No new hardware, no GPT-level wow factor, and Siri still sounds like she’s holding back tears.
➡️ Watch for: Tech investors rotating out of Cupertino and into whoever actually ships usable AI. Meme-stock nostalgia creeping back into chip names. And Apple devs tweeting passive-aggressive threads by Thursday.
4. Retail Is Bleeding Quietly in the Background
Retail job cuts are up 274% year over year. Walmart and Nike are trimming. P&G just axed 7,000 white-collar roles. And Challenger, Gray & Christmas is basically running a layoff ticker now. The workforce behind the consumer is buckling.
➡️ Watch for: Corporate earnings full of “streamlining” euphemisms. Summer hiring freezes dressed up as efficiency. And the Fed pretending the labor market is “resilient” while everyone’s boss quietly updates their org chart.
Looking Ahead:
June 13 — PPI Report: Wholesale Warning Shot
Producer Price Index hits Thursday. With tariffs heating up and supply chains twitching, this is where early inflation signs show teeth. If input costs jump, consumer prices follow. If they stay flat, soft landing crew gets another week to gloat.
June 14 — CPI Report: The Big Reveal
CPI has the power to shake rate-cut fantasies awake or knock them out cold. A hotter-than-expected print—and even Powell’s December pivot gets ghosted. A cooler one, and the market starts whispering “July cut?” again. Either way, this is the inflation checkpoint everyone’s been dreading.
June 14 — Consumer Sentiment: Reality Check Incoming
Michigan’s sentiment index drops right after CPI—and that timing matters. If inflation rattles, so does confidence. Between retail layoffs, food prices, and Trump’s tariff drumbeat, we’re in “vibes-based economics” territory now. Consumers feel it before economists chart it.
Any Day — LA Unrest, Bitcoin Bulls, and Tariff Roulette
Trump says he might arrest Newsom. The National Guard is still in LA. Bitcoin is moonwalking again. And China hasn’t blinked on rare earths. This isn’t a news cycle—it’s a stress test in motion. One wrong tweet, one surprise ruling, and the whole narrative resets.
OUR FEATURED BUSINESS
Although you should consider a more serious font like Miller Text, an elegant and grounded typeface used by New York Times. Or Helvetica Neue, which is used by both Apple and the IRS.